Stefani Martucci is the pastry chef at Kool Beanz Cafe. Photography by Alicia Osborne.
Consider the bunet.
If you grew up in northwestern Italy like Stefania Martucci, a mere mention of the sweet custard dish stirs childhood memories of family meals destined to conclude with the irresistible treat.
“It’s the quintessential Piedmont dessert,” Martucci says, “and it’s the perfect blend of chocolate and amaretto crumble. Traditionally, it’s the ideal end for a meal of agnolotti (three-meat ravioli) and brasato al Barolo (roasted beef in Barolo wine). Mine follows my family’s recipe, and the hardest thing is to bake it perfectly—the texture has to be silky and decadent.”
As a kid, Martucci would skip those epic Sunday entrees to save room for the bunet. Now that she has her own kids, it’s their favorite too. As the new pastry chef at Kool Beanz Cafe, one of Tallahassee’s most popular dining spots for the past three decades, Martucci calls it her signature dish. In a certain way, the bunet has led Martucci to where she is right now—dressed in black slacks and a matching chef’s shirt bearing her initials, focused and excited to bring her European swerve to Southern palettes nurtured on banana pudding and sweet potato pie.
Martucci moved from Turin, Italy, to the Panhandle in 2021, after her husband had started working as a Classics professor at Florida State University. Over the past few years, Martucci cultivated a fanbase at the Frenchtown Farmers Market in a historic Black neighborhood in Tallahassee, where she sold her homemade specialties like those bunets.
“People loved it,” she says. “It’s something unexpected. Something that is so traditional in my hometown, here is seen as exotic.”
A passion for food may simply be part of the Italian DNA, with centuries of cultural heritage bubbling in every pot of marinara. “Food is always central to any Italian person,” Martucci says. “From my mom’s side, all of my family cooked very well.” But she wasn’t born into her career. Martucci’s businessman father happened to own a restaurant, but she worked in the family’s construction firm. In 2014, however, a moment of self-discovery led her to sign up for classes at a Turin culinary academy.
Martucci plates a piece of bunet. Photography by Alicia Osborne.
“I always had this desire to develop my art,” she says. “At some point, I decided food was my thing and was my only real interest—the thing that always makes me feel enthusiastic.”
Martucci spent three summers visiting her brother on the Spanish island of Ibiza, a notorious party destination, working as a seasonal pastry chef in an Italian restaurant. She also got to indulge her love for gelato, which isn’t simply Italian for “ice cream” but its very own type of ice cream. “I just had my second kid,” she says. “There was a gelato store close by, and they gave me the chance to go there to practice, so I was in the lab. I decided that gelato is amazing.”
She brought all those experiences when she moved to Tallahassee with two of her children (a third is now grown up). “When I moved here, I felt so lucky that I could start again my life from zero,” Martucci says. The family became fans of Kool Beanz, with its vivid decor and freewheeling American cuisine informed by everything from the nearby Gulf Coast to a host of global cultures. When Martucci’s husband glimpsed a post seeking a new pastry chef on the restaurant’s Facebook page, she went for it.
At her audition, “She knocked it out of the park,” says Keith Baxter, owner and founder of Kool Beanz.
“First of all, her desserts are very different than anything you get in Tallahassee,” he continues, “and our sales are proving that they’re very well accepted. She has professionalism. She has dedication. She has passion … and it shows every day. She’s a department of one. Only she can do what she can do.”
Stefania Martucci shared her recipe for the perfect pavolova.
Martucci’s pavlova is a local favorite at Kool Beanz Cafe. Photography by Alicia Osborne.
While Martucci excels in shaking up expectations, successful menus tend to offer at least a classic or two—crowd-pleasing dishes that can entertain a broad demographic of customers. In the world of Italian cuisine, there’s one famous dessert that rises above the rest—a fixture as common as red-and-white checkered tablecloths at spaghetti joints nationwide, with a flavor so well-known the taste can come as a total afterthought. Presto: tiramisu.
“So it’s the first time that I try to make a tiramisu (at Kool Beanz),” Martucci says. “I have so many ideas that it’s not necessary to make tiramisu, right? But I have at least 10 ways to make it.” Just a week before, Martucci was making a traditional French profiterole. “The people loved it so much, I was thinking, Why not change the flavor? And I made it like it’s a tiramisu.” She starts with eclair dough, “filled with a coffee cream and glazed with mascarpone, with powdered cocoa on top, and things like that. The flavor is the one of tiramisu. The consistency is something different, more personal.” Martucci’s elevated version abandons the practice of soaking a ladyfinger in coffee. “It’s better because this coffee pastry cream is a little more intense, so the coffee is more strong. And if I eat tiramisu, I want to taste the coffee.”
That creative pursuit of flavor and sensory satisfactions was perhaps first driven by the rich resources available to Martucci in her native Turin. She raves about the hazelnuts—an essential element of the bunet—the quality of which she sometimes struggles to find here. On the other hand, she has a wider range of ingredients to choose from. “I can try more things, like Asian influences,” says Martucci, who is a fan of local Asian and Middle Eastern markets. “Probably in Italy, we are a little too traditional. Here in the United States … there are influences from other kinds of cultures that are very interesting.”
When you cook, you can use a lot of creativity—you can taste, and say something needs more salt, or it’s a little spicy. In pastry, you have to follow rules.
—Stefania Martucci
One particular delight is the mango. The fruit surely doesn’t grow in the Piedmont under the shadow of the Alps. Florida’s tropical climate, however, turns mango orchards as vivid as neon with the sticky, pulpy fruit. “To be honest, when you buy a mango in my country, it’s always so bad,” Martucci laments. “You have to use the professional puree. But here, they’re amazing.”
The mango provides a burst of sweetness to Martucci’s passion fruit and vanilla layer cake, which she calls “a pure exercise of fantasy.” The dish is particularly effective because of the way Martucci utilizes sugar. There’s none of that coma-inducing overload promised by the gooey peach cobbler at your
favorite meat-and-three. “European pastry uses less sugar than the American,” the chef explains. “This is something I always try to keep in my desserts. If I make a strawberry dessert, I want to feel the strawberry—it doesn’t have to be covered by too much sugar. I try to elevate the flavor of the ingredient.”
Martucci gives play to a delightful palette of colors in her desserts and loves to introduce surprising contrasts in texture or flavor. There is, literally, no sweet without some sour. “Especially, a restaurant dessert has to have it, because it’s the end of the meal,” she says. “Usually, people have saved not so much room. It’s important that it’s not too sweet.”
Kool Beanz Cafe has been a Tallahassee mainstay since 1996. Illustration by Jules Ozaeta.
In the end, crafting Italian desserts comes down to science. “When you cook, you can use a lot of creativity—you can taste, and say something needs more salt, or it’s a little spicy. In pastry, you have to follow rules,” Martucci says. It’s math, not mood. “If you think to change something because you are in a hurry, you get it wrong.”
As she speaks, Martucci projects a genuine zest for what she’s doing, the abiding thrill of someone who has landed exactly in the place she wanted to be, with no reason to suspect a year ago that she’d be right here, dreaming up her ideal desserts, inspired by European authenticity and a taste for innovation.
“They are super, super open-minded with me,” she says of Kool Beanz, reflecting on her requests for exactly the right component to turn a new idea into a diner’s perfect final bite, “when I drive them crazy that I want this ingredient, or, (ask) ‘Where do you find it?’ Sometimes you have to be flexible. You try to make it work.”
That is, of course, the joy of cooking.
“I think about all these new ingredients, new techniques that you can learn every day,” Martucci says. “It’s a continuous evolution, pastry. Every month, you learn something new: a new technique, a new ingredient that can help you to make the texture better, and things like that. It’s something that gives me so much satisfaction. I have a friend that once told me, ‘Find your passion, and look for someone who pays for it, and this is the reason for happiness.’ And that’s true.”
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Steve, a Tallahassee native and Flamingo contributor since 2017, has written about film, music, art and other popular culture for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, GQ, and The Los Angeles Times. He is the artistic director for the Tallahassee Film Festival and writes a monthly film newsletter for Flamingo, Dollar Matinee.
Dining and Cooking